Hamlet solioquy
Hamlet solioquyCondemned to Reality
Renowned for his unparalleled quality and quantity of work, William Shakespeare is not generally recognized as a great philosophical thinker. However it is seen in nearly all of his works that a great thinker is behind the words, which can be better appreciated by modern generations that value not only for his genius but his ability to explore concepts that were not fully examined until centuries after his death. In perhaps his most famous soliloquy taken from Hamlet, Shakespeare addresses not only the existential plight of man but inadvertently reveals the necessity of religion to mankind.
This piece is based on Hamlet’s view that existence is a struggle against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (line 3). His outlook is marked by the sorrows of life and it is his belief that there is no happiness in mans existence. He is cursed “to grunt and sweat under a weary life”(22). Born into the blight of existence it has become a struggle for him to live daily. He has seen the “oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, [felt] the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay [and] the insolence of office” and feels that this are symptoms of an evil world in which he wants no part. He feels condemned to a world that he despises which is very essence of his anguish, the only escape he sees is that of death which presents its own dilemma, the infinite unknown. Hamlet asks, in lines fifteen through twenty-one why should a man not end his life and consequently end his suffering. He answers that man cannot because of the possibility that death is worse that life, so he commits to nothing and accordingly tells us that “conscience does make cowards of us all” speaking of his own failure to make a choice.
It would be a misconception to believe that Hamlet offers no possibility of and alternative to his problem. He does dream of what might await him in the afterlife. He fantasizes of being in “a sleep to… end the heartache” and ”perchance to dream” a basic escape from reality(5)(9). It is important that he uses sleep as an allusion to death being that death is unknown where as sleep is not an unsolvable mystery so in fact death and sleep are separate concepts that have coagulated in his mind. Death, as far as man knows, is final and in the mind of Hamlet might hold an even worse fate. There is not an option to wake up and once you have lost life in the world it seems that you have no control of what happens to you. This similar to Hamlet’s life, which promises only to make him “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”(2).
The use of “fortune” is also important in understanding this piece in that fortune carries the connation...
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